Yes, Antifa is real, and violent, and when it calls you a “fascist,” it just means you’re a target.
Posted by Ed Folsom, January 14, 2026.
The headline on Christopher Mathias’s January 12, 2026 article in The Nation blares: “Liberals Think Antifa Isn’t Real. But It Is—and It Knows How to Win.” Just less than three months ago, on October 16, 2025, the same outlet ran this headline: “The Right Is Lying About Left-Wing Violence–The Trump administration is using an imagined enemy – ‘antifa’–to justify turning ICE into an ultra-violent, unaccountable army invading US cities.”
Back then it was “antifa” the imaginary enemy. Suddenly, there’s no need put quotes around the name anymore. No, Antifa is real. And not only is it real, but Mathias concludes his tribute piece with this: “To protect us all, liberals owe antifa solidarity, not derision. Admitting that antifa exists, that it is real, and that it is worth defending would be a good place to start.”
For the left, expediency no longer requires denying Antifa’s existence. They have reached the point where expediency requires them to jettison that strategy and to defend Antifa. You are about to see much more of Antifa, and so the left’s defense of it has begun. Prime example: Mathias’s piece in The Nation.
But just what is this Antifa to which the left, in order to protect itself, owes solidarity? Mathias tells us that despite what he claims is a lot of right-wing mythology about Antifa:
“[T]he truth about antifa—what it actually is, where it comes from, what it’s accomplished—is still spectacular. ‘Antifa,’ a shortening of the word ‘antifascist,’ refers to a decentralized, underground network of radical leftists dedicated to destroying the far right. Its activists are mostly anarchists, communists, and socialists, and, though they might differ in ideology, they all subscribe to a specific militant tradition of antifascism holding that fascists need to be fought ‘by any means necessary.’”
Mathias continues:
“Although antifa groups are very real, and often collaborate, there is not an overarching organization. There are no leaders. No hierarchies. No org chart or headquarters. Decisions are arrived at locally and collectively, with no rich donors to appease. What little money antifa needs is taken from the shallow pockets of its practitioners, mostly working- and middle-class Americans who keep their activism a secret to prevent reprisals from the fascists they fight…
The activists I met were mostly spies and researchers who had formed something altogether extraordinary and, I would argue, grossly under-appreciated. They created an informal, grassroots underground intelligence agency across America.”
“No rich donors” eh? Stay tuned. That aside, this informal, grassroots underground intelligence agency that is spread throughout the country, dedicated to fighting “fascists” by any means necessary, sounds like a real thing.
Of course, it’s been obvious for a long time, to anyone not choosing denial, that Antifa is real. For one thing, something that doesn’t exist hardly ever has its own flag, bearing its own political symbols, carried by armies of people uniformly dressed head-to-toe in black who wave it while marching and rioting in the streets. But Antifa does.
For anyone concerned that Antifa’s “necessary” means of battling “fascists” might involve illegal or even violent acts, Mathias says, “few of the activists I talked with had ever punched a Nazi—though most would have no moral quandaries in doing so.” But mostly, they’re just an informal, clandestine intelligence agency; a sort of underground secret police force of leftist collaborators, that’s all.
In fact, violence is integral to Antifa’s “by all means necessary” approach.
Reporter Andy Ngo was hospitalized, in Portland, Oregon, on June 29, 2019, and again on May 28, 2021, because of beatings administered by black-clad Antifa collaborators who objected to his presence at their demonstrations. Ngo takes issue with Mathias, pointing out that Mathias wrote his January 12 article in the Nation:
“knowing North Texas Antifa members and associates recently admitted to terrorism crimes for an ambush shooting on an ICE facility resulting in a local officer being shot in the neck. He wrote it after five people part of an Antifa-style cell in Southern California and Louisiana were recently arrested for allegedly planning bombings and a shooting. He wrote it after the State Department designed four foreign Antifa groups terror organizations for their campaigns of shootings and bombings in Europe. He wrote it after an Antifa member assassinated a Trump supporter in Portland. He wrote it after an Antifa member tried to blow up an ICE facility in Tacoma. He wrote it after targeting me for speaking out about Antifa violence after his comrades repeatedly tried to kill me.”
The North Texas event that Ngo refers to happened on the night of July 4, 2025. A group of Antifa collaborators, all dressed in black, drew the attention of ICE personnel and local police by igniting fireworks outside an ICE detention facility in Prairieland, Texas, near Dallas. This fireworks drew ICE personnel and police who came along to investigate into an ambush, as at least one Antifa collaborator opened fire from nearby woods with a rifle. A police officer was shot in the neck but survived (story here).
Nineteen people have been arrested in connection with the incident. Five of them have pled guilty to charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization – Antifa. In a brief, November 19, 2025, news story on the guilty pleas, PBS News described Antifa as follows:
“Antifa, short for ‘anti-fascists,’ is not a single organization but rather an umbrella term for left-leaning militant groups that confront or resist neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations.”
See, what Antifa does is just laudable stuff, like confronting or resisting neo-Nazis and white supremacists at demonstrations, except when Antifa are drawing ICE personnel and police into ambushes and shooting them, or beating Andy Ngo into a brain bleed for reporting in their presence. But, thanks to Christoper Mathias, we now know that Antifa is mostly just an informal, non-hierarchical, underground intelligence agency made up of anarchist, communist and socialist collaborators — now that it is expedient to acknowledge their existence and rally to their defense, that is.
What PBS did in its news blurb on the Antifa guilty pleas was to adopt Antifa’s public relations propaganda. This was PBS doing its part to defend Antifa when it is impossible to maintain that Antifa isn’t real. In fact, the mainstream press has been covering for Antifa at least since the “Defund the Police,” “All Cops Are Bastards” (ACAB) days of 2020-2021. Back then, when Antifa crowds popped-up, clad in black, agitating and participating in street riots, anyone who complained about them was told Antifa isn’t a real thing, just an idea, or an ideology…or something. What are you, a ConSpiRaCY THeOriSt?!
But now that Antifa’s existence, as something more than just an idea or an ideology has become too obvious to deny, the press, being ever-sympathetic to the cause of anarchists, socialists, and communists, will try to sell us a euphemized version. Playing-off the “anti-fascist” moniker that Antifa designed to flatter itself, the media tell us that Antifa is just groups of people who confront fascists and neo-Nazis at demonstrations.
Why, how can anything be more noble than that?!
But who are these “fascists” and “Nazis,” and what is this “far right” that Antifa is committed to fighting and destroying by all necessary means? In fact, the words fascists, Nazi, far right, etc., are no more than epithets that Antifa attaches to individuals and groups it targets for violence. When Antifa calls someone a fascist, that doesn’t identify the person as a fascist in any real sense. But it does mean that Antifa has targeted that person for violence.
If you are not one of them, if you somehow obstruct their ideological path, you are a “fascist.” So it has always been with Antifa, and so it will always be. It’s part of a very long tradition, because Antifa has been around for a very long time as one or another slight variation on the same theme — for as long as that flag and that aesthetic that they march under have been around.
You can believe it or not, but the Antifa tradition began in Germany, in 1932, with the founding, by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), of Antifaschistische Aktion (Antifascist Action, or Antifa). The KPD was a subsidiary of the Soviet Communist Party under Joseph Stalin at that time, and Antifaschistische Aktion was a communist front group whose chief mission was to battle the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) who, because they were not communists/socialists, and because they were the KPD’s strongest political rivals, were smeared by Antifa as “fascist.”
The Wikipedia entry for “Antifa (Germany)” points out:
“In his 2012 sympathetic history of Antifaschistische Aktion, published by the Association for the Promotion of Antifascist Culture, Bernd Langer notes that ‘antifascism was always a fundamentally anti-capitalist strategy’ and that ‘communists always took antifascism to mean anti-capitalism. Therefore, all other parties were fascist in the opinion of the KPD, and especially the SPD’.”
In other words, from the beginning, to be called “fascist” by Antifa meant merely that you were a capitalist, that you were not one of them, that you were The Other.
Moving forward, the same Wikepedia piece tells us what Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution says about the leftists of Antifa in current times:
“The field of ‘anti-fascism’ has for years been a central element of the political activity of far-left extremists, especially violent ones. […] Far-left extremists within this tradition only superficially claim to fight far-right activities. In reality the focus is the struggle against the liberal democratic basic order, which is smeared as a ‘capitalist system’ with ‘fascist’ roots.“ [emphasis mine]
As you can see, Antifa has existed as a very real thing for a very long time. Today’s American Antifa like to publicly disavow any connection to its lineage because it exposes them for who they really are. But it’s no coincidence that Antifa in America flies essentially the same flag flown by Antifaschistische Aktion in 1930’s Germany, and flown by Antifa, everywhere, ever since.
(Antifa symbolism, 1932 Germany and 2026 America)
If a group of people in America called itself Nazi and used a swastika as its symbol, you would readily understand that this is because it has similar ideological aims to Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party, even though the American version probably wouldn’t pursue living space for the German people (Lebensraum) as one of its chief aims, as the National Socialist German Workers Party did.
By the same token, it’s ridiculous to suppose that the core leftist, anti-capitalist tenets of Antifa in the U.S. differ materially from those of Antifaschistische Aktion and its German progeny. And “fascism” still means essentially no more than, “Political opposition that we intend to eliminate by all necessary means.”
Antifa is leftism, and leftism is inherently violent. Recall the 1970’s: the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the United Freedom Front, the FALN, the Baader-Meinhof Gang/Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, etc. Recall the 2,500 bombings that the FBI recorded in the U.S. in one 18-month period during 1971-72. Recall the targeted shootings of police by 70’s leftists.
It’s what leftists have always done. It’s what leftists do. It’s what leftists will always do.
Sure, Antifa claims to be fighting “fascists,” but all it means is that there are people Antifa targets for violence, and those are the ones they call “fascists.”
How do you know if you are a “fascist” in this scheme? If they crack your scull, you are a “fascist.”
Related Posts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(Germany)
